But while Tisseyre’s words got wild applause from the crowd assembled in the basement of the Maison Radio-Canada, and Tisseyre politely but firmly challenged CBC president Hubert Lacroix on the latter’s failure to answer a question about why he hasn’t done more to fight the federal government on CBC funding, the Radio-Canada personality doesn’t necessarily share the crowd’s animosity toward Lacroix.

A concerned citizen helps Hubert Lacroix out with the tedious resignation-letter-writing thing.

“Animosity” is perhaps an understatement here. Many in the crowd wore T-shirts that seemed to directly blame Lacroix for the thousands of job cuts the broadcaster has seen since he took office. The second question of the event asked if he should resign. Later, someone handed him what he described as a pre-written resignation letter that needed only Lacroix’s signature.

But Tisseyre told me later in a one-on-one interview that Lacroix’s resignation would serve little purpose. “If the people who were there resigned, they would be replaced by others, who would be faced with the same cuts. I think the problem is much deeper,” he said.

You can read more about Tisseyre’s comments in this (paywalled) piece I wrote for Cartt.ca. It also includes my impressions about Lacroix’s problem with expressing the right emotions to relate to his employees and CBC fans among the general population.

Did things not work out in Edmonton? It wasn’t that, White tells me, but rather he just wanted to come back home:

Everything was great in Edmonton! The station, the company, the people. Some of the nicest folk I’ve ever met and will definitely remain friends with as well as some amazing times I won’t soon forget!

I’ll be 100% honest cause there’s no reason to lie and I’m sure there’s some younglings reading this that can learn something. I got to a point where I realized I wasn’t ready for the distance. I made the move at 19 years old thinking I was ready to take on the world, I wasn’t. And I have no shame in admitting that. I’m extremely close to my family, my little brother is 12 years old and he needs his big brother around.

(Beat Program Director) Sam Zniber got in touch with me at literally the perfect time as I was going to hand in my resignation at the end of August, I wanted to give Virgin at least three months and another ratings period cause I’m not one to just jet without notice. I’ve known of Sam for a while through some mutual friends and it was a shock to actually to hear from him! This is a world renowned radio guru. I’m extremely excited to get back on The Beat and soak up every piece of knowledge Mr. Zniber has to offer!

I actually announced my departure from Virgin Edmonton the day after Tony Stark announced he was leaving Virgin Montreal, you can only imagine the amount of messages I got asking when I was starting on Virgin Montreal! Which obviously isn’t the case, was never even on the table actually.

It’s going to be nice being back on The Beat, when Leo (Da Estrela, Zniber’s predecessor) gave me my one show a week when I was 17 years old on a Wednesday night, I never would have thought all this would happen.

I’m going to learn from all of this, stay humble and continue to learn the ways of the biz to master my craft. Anyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about this industry. Eddie Van Halen once said, “You don’t play music, you live it!” Radio isn’t something you do, it’s something you live! And I thank Andre St-Amand and Sam for allowing me to continue to my dream.

It’s not often I see that kind of honesty from a radio personality. White, who’s now 20, is still very young for what he’s accomplished so far in his career. And he wouldn’t be the first radio personality to sacrifice some career advancement to stay in Montreal.

White’s first shift back is Sunday-night-to-Monday. He takes the place of Thom Drew and Jimmy James Spencer, who have apparently been let go.

“Sadly my time at The Beat here in Montreal is done,” Spencer posted on Facebook on Nov. 20. “It was a great run (mostly) So onward and upwards and all that.” He’s currently looking for work and has posted airchecks here.

Tuesday night was the first time most people in the Montreal area got to see the new TV series Mohawk Girls, a “dramedy” produced by Tracey Deer that is set and produced in Kahnawake and airs on OMNI and APTN.

The series has been a long time in the making, and the first season was actually shot two years ago. It got a good deal of attention when it was being produced then, and even more so now that it’s actually on the air.

I watched the first two episodes as they aired on APTN tonight, both as an amateur TV critic and as a regular TV viewer interested in good storytelling. I’m not an expert on Mohawk culture, nor am I an expert on television production, but I’ll offer some thoughts of how I personally see the series so far.

Listeners to 92.5 The Beat may have noticed that it’s no longer broadcasting its weekly All Access Weekend show with Anne-Marie Withenshaw, and that all evidence of her has been wiped from the station’s website.

Now we know that the station has decided to cancel the show as part of an apparent new direction in programming that involves on-air personalities being heard less and less. But what makes this story different from every other radio-personality-is-fired stories is that she’s responding with a lawsuit.

I explain the details of the suit in this story in the Montreal Gazette. Essentially, she and her company Killer Queen Productions are alleging that the station strung her along under false pretences after her contract expired at the end of August, making her believe they would renew her contract in order to prevent her from jumping to another station.

That allegation hasn’t been proven in court, and station owner Cogeco Diffusion will have a chance to present a defence.

Evanov Radio hasn’t launched its first radio station in Quebec, but it’s already working on its third.

Earlier today, staff at CFMB 1280 AM were informed that the station has been sold to the Toronto-based company. The sale, for $1.125 million, has to be approved by the CRTC, for which an application was filed last Friday.

The sale ends a 52-year run for CFMB under the ownership of founder Casimir Stanczykowski and his family. After his death in a car accident in 1981, it was up to his widow Anne-Marie and son Stefan to manage it with business partner and minority owner Andrew Mielewczyk.

But Mielewczyk and Anne-Marie Stanczykowski are well past ready to retire, and Stefan Stanczykowski is a lawyer who wants to return to that practice. Though he describes the decision to sell as bittersweet, and it was originally turned down a couple of years ago, he said he believes it’s the best decision for the future of the station.

For its part, Evanov doesn’t plan any cuts among the station’s staff of about 50. The vision is to eventually move the station’s offices and studios to co-locate with Radio Fierté on Papineau Ave. downtown. And there could be shared programming with Evanov’s other multilingual stations, CIAO 530 in Toronto and CKJS 810 in Winnipeg (the latter was also founded by Casimir Stanczykowski, but later sold to Newcap, who sold it to Evanov).

The transfer of large collections of print media to and from Quebecor has taken another step, with the announcement that Transcontinental is selling 15 magazines to its Groupe TVA subsidiary for $55.5 million (or $3.7 million each on average). (Quebecor release, Transcontinental release)

The deal, which also includes a contract that will see Transcontinental continue printing those magazines for seven years, includes the following (with number of editions a year and average circulation where I could find it):

Stark didn’t say why he’s leaving, saying only that he’d make an announcement in a few weeks. This almost certainly suggests that he’s moving to another station that isn’t ready to announce his hiring yet.

My guess on that would be Jump! 106.9 in Ottawa, based on some circumstantial but telling evidence I’ve seen. The station recently announced a job opening for a morning show host, which would make sense. We’ll see if that’s true. Jump, CKQB-FM, was The Bear until a relaunch this spring under the management of Mark Dickie, the former general manager at The Beat in Montreal. It’s a mainstream top 40 station, and has a style similar to Virgin.

Two years ago, Stark announced he was leaving Virgin for another job at a radio station in Halifax. But then he changed his mind and stayed in Montreal. He said the reconsideration was for “personal reasons” without elaborating.

Once a year, my employer the Montreal Gazette hands out bursaries to promising Concordia University journalism students. For the past four years, I’ve been interviewing the winners after they receive their awards to ask them about themselves and their thoughts on the future of journalism. I posted one set of interviews in 2010 and another in 2011.

Though I did more interviews in 2012 and 2013, I never got around to posting them. Today, another set of students will be coming in to receive these bursaries, so I figured it’s time to find those dusty notebooks and finally post what these people told me, along with some updates of what they’ve done since.

So here we are, another series of profiles of, if the selection committee is right, journalism’s latest rising stars:

The station, owned by Evanov Radio subsidiary Dufferin Communications and carrying the brand The Jewel, is currently in its on-air testing phase, which began Nov. 4. Another Evanov station, Radio Fierté 980 AM, is also testing and will launch in January with about 10 full-time employees.

The Jewel is an easy-listening format and has six stations in Ontario and another in Winnipeg. The Hudson station at 1,420 watts ERP should easily cover the western off-island area, plus adjacent areas like Oka, the West Island and Ile Perrot. Reception in the Montreal area is complicated by co-channel interference from WIZN 106.7 in Burlington, Vt., and in eastern Ontario it should be wiped out by Jump 106.9 (CKQB-FM).

Like Fierté, The Jewel is playing music and station IDs. It asks anyone who finds problems to email signal@jewel1067.com.

UPDATE: No word on a launch date, which has more to do with when Industry Canada gives its approval than anything else. If there are no problems reported, “we should be officially on the air by Christmas,” says Evanov VP Carmela Laurignano. “For the first while we will have a music intensive program. The full format will roll out in the new year.”

The station expects to have about 20 employees. No names have been released yet.

On Wednesday morning, a press release announced that the new station, to be launched today, will be called New Country 94, and will be a country music station. (Its webiste is newcountry94.com, registered on Oct. 9.)

CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais has had to answer for decisions that the CRTC hasn’t made or positions it hasn’t proposed.

Over two weeks of CRTC hearings over the future of television in September, I monitored discussion over Twitter. And I saw a lot of crazy ideas being thrown out about the commission, some of which I might simply disagree with, but much of which is just plain inaccurate or misinformed. Since then, the volume has died down, but the same points keep getting brought up.

So to try to clear things up, here are some things people are saying about the CRTC and how television is regulated in Canada that could use a reality check.

What’s upsetting about this to people like C’est juste de la TV’s Dave Ouellet, seen in the video above, is that the costume department isn’t just a closet of dresses. It’s a tool used by television and theatre productions, whether associated with Radio-Canada or not (Les Appendices, a Télé-Québec show, makes use of it), and it’s a cultural archive with many pieces that are historic because they were worn by important figures in Quebec’s cultural history.

And because it rents out costumes, but few people seem to know about this, there’s an argument that it could be made to pay for itself or even make a profit for the CBC if properly managed.

There’s a Facebook page and a petition to save the costume department, but it looks like the decision is made and unlikely to be reversed.

The good news is that heritage costumes won’t be thrown into the garbage. Radio-Canada has identified 72 of the more than 90,000 costumes that would be saved. The rest would be auctioned off, given to the highest bidder — presumably a private costume company — who can continue to make them available to Quebecers.

That wouldn’t be the worst outcome. If the CBC can’t make a collection of 90,000 costumes profitable, then maybe it should go to a private company who can. But taking this collection out of the public control and leaving it to the whims of a private company is a big risk.

I can only hope that Radio-Canada structures its tender for bids and eventual contract so that our cultural institutions can still make use of these costumes without paying through the nose for them.